


O Brother

by karanguni



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-21
Updated: 2009-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 00:00:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Stigma makes Rufus recall other sicknesses that are so well steeped in blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	O Brother

By enumerating and labelling and identifying them, Rufus Shinra keeps his dying dreams in order, and relegates them to straightforward sanity. This is Rufus Shinra, three months to the day the Stigma crept under his clothes: less than thirty and going on a cynical hundred, he wakes up in the morning and lets his body puke and shit and stain the sheets. As it would. Rufus rides through it, the argument with(in) his system punctuated by fevered, frenzied memories that are spat back at him, bridging the years between his broken Babylon and the old Eden his father built and that he'd run eastward of. Rufus has too little imagination to dream: all his hallucinations are efforts of recombination and resuscitation, classroom lessons and bedroom etiquette:

Is it better to be loved or to be feared, O Prince?

That is a hallucination, gifted to him on a Monday morning, four a.m. of a new morning, his sheets stinking with black pus and the retch of bile staining Haelin's hardwood floors. Acid crawls, burning, up the back of his throat. Rufus licks the taste off the roof of his tongue and slides through the ensuing dizziness. Love is, love was, love is the feeling of youth coursing through you: his first hallucination is this, that of himself at sixteen, retching up hopes and ambitions and carving them on the palimpsest of his father's long history.

Memory one: his father never loved his mother, but that is and was not much of a thing to pity - how many husbands love their wives, and how many wives sit at the top of the world? Perhaps it was equivalent trade; Rufus never has and never did and never will know; she was gone by the time his persistent memory began to archive; and better for him that she did, and better for his father. A mother would've made him weak with affection, if she'd been the saint Rufus idly imagines her to be. In the midst of hazy fever he dreams of her white and virginal face.

His father used to fuck many white and virginal faces, and more of them that weren't one or either or both of the two. Memory two: his father never failed to love women. What an easy distraction, easily purchased in Midgar and easily disposed of. Their children were aborted either with hangers, scalpels or money. Whores, being intelligent, knew little good would come of bearing Shinra children; debutantes, being belligerent, saw great potential in rearing a brood of the meek, all ready to inherit the earth.

Remember that this is a hallucination: that Rufus is sixteen, that Rufus is ill and legitimate, that Rufus is not meek, and so has not been deemed ready to inherit anything at all. Whether this next part is an illusion is up to you: that Rufus is angry, that Rufus is unconvinced of his father's prodigious talents, that Rufus is unwilling to writhe through the agonies of puberty without ensuing rewards of power and entertainment. This much of his hysteria is real: it is true that, at that age and at that time and in the middle of an unsatisfactory world, Rufus Shinra used to walk into elevators and smile at a man more than ten years his senior, his tongue tracing the tip of his teeth, touching tasting tentatively tabulating, and then used again to talk, to say: 'Director Lazard.'

Who will reply, 'Vice-President,' and not attach or speak or acknowledge Rufus' name.

(O Prince, what are you meant to look like? Not like this: not like a man with sweat-drowned hair, laying so so very so very, very still on a bed, knuckles tightened around sheets and veins showing deoxygenated blue. Men like that are ignored.) A prince of a nation is he, is Rufus Shinra, who now flutters his eyelashes wet and sticky with salt, and dreams of fisting an erection and pumping pushing thrusting fucking, dreams of frottage and pleasure, an endorphine burst, something to take away the scratch of linen and the nightmare of spewing black, dark water from every orifice, and this is hallucination number two:

Number two, Lazard Deusericus. His hair is unlike Rufus' own - when Rufus, like his father, is strawberry growing out into paleness, Lazard is platinum, finely boned and comely with chivalry. He smiles and wears white gloves, and _that_ is where they are too similar, in the lying and in the aversion to touch and the obsession with having, having, having, having everything.

'How are the SOLDIER corps doing?'

'Fine enough; the third batch has made progress and their abilities are growing at the expected rate.'

'The genetics are holding up?'

'They aren't collapsing; the trials have long since ceased being simply clinical.'

'You can't predict the genome.'

'Professor Hojo's close to perfected the process,' Deusericus says. 'He's honed it to an art.'

'Love is an art form, science is a process,' Rufus shakes his head ( _did he did I would I?_ ). 'You've confused the two during the course of your little adventure.' He flicks through the screens of his mind and the reader in his hand, all those faces and names - black haired municipal boys from Gongaga and Nibelheim, tanned adolescents from the Costa region, and their very own pale wraiths from under-Plate sectors. 'You're playing house,' Rufus laughs, stroking a finger down the digital-immaterial imprint of the faces of Shinra's generals. 'Who are they to you? A father there, or maybe an uncle, and a son even - but what about the red general, our Genesis - what is he? a brother? No, why would you bother, you've such better substitutes elsewhere.'

'The exertion implied by the scope of your vice-presidential duties has driven you to tactlessness,' Lazard says, shifting his glasses up on his nose and shrugging with an eloquent lift of a shoulder, rolling and roiling like mist and memorised syllables, the way he used to say such things: what an orator he is. 'As always, Rufus. You should ask _your father_ to give you a break, send you on a sabbatical. It may ease your temper to be on holiday, maybe go off to del Sol where the atmosphere fits the rigour of your work schedule.'

'And who'll chaperone the president while I'm gone?' Rufus raises an eyebrow, unfazed by the transparency of Lazard, of how his face blends into the foreground of the locked door of his room at the Lodge. 'If left alone my father sometimes does reckless things; if I let him fuck around you never know what bastards he may produce.'

'You can cross every line you want, Rufus,' Lazard says. 'It'll have no --'

'Oh,' Rufus agrees, cutting in. 'I'll cross them, and faster than you ever did.'

'You can insult me,' Lazard says, 'and continue to undercut me at every meeting we share, but even if you burn my career before me in order to raise your own, Rufus, all you do is stand on the shoulders of others, reaching upward with your beggar's bowl to catch some gil falling from your father's fists.'

It didn't happen that way, because Lazard is full of equanimity and serenity and motherfucked geniality, nurtured by his men and watered by a political solvent mind. What had he had, o captain, o captain? Director Deusericus, champion of men. He must've -

'You must fuck blindly without those on,' Rufus thinks he must say, tapping his temple to indicate where Lazard's glasses would've set. 'I wouldn't like that.'

'What,' Lazard could say, could've said, says: 'my taste, or my myopia?'

'Either,' Rufus says.

'Well, you very likely share both - and with such poor vision and at such great distances, god knows if you'd recognise who you're fucking, so long as his hair is as black as his clothes -'

'Better than you, at least,' Rufus shoots back, to his dream. 'Yours have hearts to match pitch.'

'You were right,' Lazard tells him, told him, and tells him again. 'It's all in the genetics.'

'Oh, fuck you,' Rufus says, and squinting in the inverse of his head he thinks, recalling with some difficulty through his nausea, how Lazard looked so much like his father: O brother, Rufus mumbles as the spasms of this last attack fade and the room realigns into time and space and the reality of Kadaj and the remnant's search for something Rufus knows he won't find. O brother, my brother.


End file.
